When he was about ten, Cost Centre #1 (the boy, not the girl) started getting interested in US college football.  It occurred to him that maybe he and I had some “common ground”, since I was working a fair bit on rankings at the time.  Every Saturday morning, whenever the chyron threw up a new matchup, he’d yell “hey dad: Mississippi State, is that a good school?”  “hey, dad, what about Auburn?”, etc.  He had little interest in my explanations that “good” and “highly ranked” were not necessarily the same thing, basically telling me “yeah, yeah, yeah, just tell me which one is better.”

I eventually came up with some basic rules of thumb for understanding American school names and prestige.

1. Institutions named after people are usually more prestigious than universities named after places.
2. If it has the word “state” in the name, there’s probably a better university nearby (there are exceptions, like Ohio).
3. If the name has one of the four cardinal points in it, and that cardinal point is not in the name of the state in which it is located (“e.g. “Eastern Kentucky” or “Northern Arizona”), it is probably not that prestigious (oddly, universities with intercardinal points like Northeastern and Northwestern are prestigious).

Lately, I realized that there is a kind of fourth rule, which is that where there are standalone universities (i.e. not part of a state system) which are named after the city they are located, there are almost certainly better universities nearby (exceptions: Chicago and I guess Miami).  You can see this rule at work when Americans talk about Canadian universities: McGill gets all sorts of respect while mere “Toronto” has more difficulty than it should to get into the conversation. 

But in the rest of the world, it is different.  In Canada, most provinces follow the rule that the institution with the province’s name in it is the “prestige” university.  Nova Scotia and Ontario don’t have any universities named after the province (though U of T was for many decades conceived of as the provincial university – insert your own Toronto joke here), and so have “top” universities named after a person and a city respectively.  Quebec arguably has two “top universities”, again, one each for a city and a person.

Overseas of course, the nomenclature rules are completely different.  In Western Europe, prestige universities almost exclusively named after their cities.  In fact, the number that are not can be listed on about one hand (King’s and St. Mary’s in London, La Sapiena in Rome, Humboldt University in Berlin, Jagiellonian University in Krakow).  From Germany eastwards, though, you get this hybrid naming phenomenon which makes things a bit trickier.  The University of Munich and the University of Tubingen still sort of retain the names of their 15^th-century founders (Ludwig Maximilian and Eberhard Karls).  In Russia, universities explicitly have two names – e.g. the University of Moscow named after Mikhail Lomonsov, Ural Federal University named after Boris Yeltsin, etc. 

Asia mostly conforms to the Western European model, where the top universities in any given region are named after cities rather than individuals.  There are a few exceptions: top universities in Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia are named after the country not the city (a historical quirk leaves Malaysia’s top university as “Malaya” rather than the actual name, but this need not detain us), two top Chinese universities have essentially made-up names (Fudan =  Aurora rising, Tsinghua = China Flower, and yes, I’m taking some liberties on translation), and Yonsei University in Korea is a portmanteau of the names of its two parent institutions.  Thailand’s Chulalongkorn university, named after a King, is I believe the only big university in the region named after a person, unless you want to try to throw in Nazrabayev University in Kazakhstan (which, personally, I wouldn’t).

Elsewhere it is messier.  Top Latin American universities tend to be named after the country; though occasionally top universities have a religious connection (many have a Pontifical University which will make the top 2-3).  Argentina’s top university, the monstrously bloated Universidad de Buenos Aires, is named after the city, as are Sao Paolo and Campinas (other top Brazilian universities such as Minas Gerais tend to be named after states).  Sub-Saharan Africa and the Gulf are a complete mish-mash, where top universities can meet any of these criteria.  City names (Cairo, Kinshasa, Dar Es Salaam, Cape Town)? Cool.  Country names (Malawi, Ghana, United Arab Emirates)?  Also cool.  The ones named after individuals are often named after royals (King Abdullah in Saudi, King Hassan in Morocco, Sultan Qaboos in Oman), and in one case after an academic (Cheka Ante Diop in Senegal).  And then, unusually, there are top universities named after geographic features which are not cities or countries (Makerere in Uganda, which is named after a district of Kampala, and Witswatersrand, which is basically an escarpment). 

I don’t know if there’s anything you can really take from this, other than that the US is a real outlier internationally and its naming conventions are, to some extent, a reflection and a reminder of the role philanthropy has played in the development of that country’s higher education system. 

Happy weekend.